A used couch yields $40,000 for students, who give it back

UPDATE : The reward for their honesty: $1,000, enough for Dogfish Head beer at the celebration dinner

BY JEREMIAH HORRIGAN

NEW PALTZ — Lara Russo thought the new couch felt kind of lumpy. It was April, they'd bought the couch a few weeks earlier. What could you expect from a $20 Salvation Army special?

It was Russo's roommate, Reese Werkhoven, who discovered the source of the lumpiness when he pulled a plastic-wrapped envelope from the couch's cushions. The envelope contained $4,000 in old-looking hundred-dollars bills. More packets of money surfaced. Before long, they had $40,000.

The two friends rushed to the bedroom where their friend Carly Guasti was reading.

How do you describe the feelings that come with discovering what turned out to be a cache of $40,000 in cash?

“We just started freaking out,” Guasti recalled Thursday.

Guasti is a case worker for Family of New Paltz. Russo is a graduate of SUNY New Paltz and Werkhoven a junior at the college. They share an apartment on Libertyville Road in the Town of New Paltz.

The first thing the friends did was lock the door to their apartment. Then they called their parents, who all counseled silence. Was it drug money? Was someone looking for it?

Not knowing where the money came from didn't stop the friends from going to a favored bar in New Paltz where, in Guasti's words, “we basked in the possibilities.”

Maybe they'd get a piece of land somewhere. Or travel. Maybe buy a boat.

It wasn't until the next day that the mystery began to resolve itself, and the friends began to look at their windfall in a new light.

They found what appeared to be a bank statement among the money packets. It contained a woman's name and address.

The money, presumably, belonged to her.

“But we didn't know if she was alive or dead, we didn't know anything about her,” Guasti said.

But of one thing they were sure: if the money's true owner could be found, and everything was legal, they'd return it.

“After all, Guasti said, “we'd done nothing to earn it.”

The friends located the woman and her family that day and learned her story.

The elderly woman had been sleeping on the couch. She'd had surgery some weeks before and been told she needed to get a real bed. Her son-in-law obliged by donating the couch to the Salvation Army in New Paltz.

The woman (whom the friends agreed not to identify) explained she and her late husband, who had been a contractor, had secreted the money in the battered couch over the years.

The woman's daughter and son-in-law were flabbergasted to learn how much money the woman had stashed away. They gave the friends $1,000.

“We went out and had a nice dinner,” Guasti said. “Dogfish Head instead of the usual college student beer.”

For all the excitement the discovery caused, and the subsequent celebrity of being in the news, Guasti said the decision to give the money back was “nothing heroic.”

“You have to remember we're coming at this from a position of privilege. We're young. We're college students. We don't even have any student debt. We might have looked at the money differently if we were hungry and, or, out of work.”